Yeah, more a potentially interesting "fyi" than anything. The more I look the more I think しか just doesn't have kanji... I wonder how it was written in manyougana?
– ssbApr 4 '14 at 4:18

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@hippietrail Please excuse my ignorance but where can I see those requests in English Wikitonary?
– paullbApr 4 '14 at 5:16

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@ssb I don't think it's old enough for that to be relevant. The earliest cite in 日国 is dated 1784か. Martin in A Reference Grammar of Japanese reports on p.80 that Ōtsuki derives sika from a contraction of siki (as in kore-siki) plus the particle wa. He says siki is of uncertain etymology; a couple suggestions he gives are that it's a variant of soko or a shortening of suk[os]i, but he doesn't appear to find these explanations satisfying.
– snailboat♦Apr 4 '14 at 5:27

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I had no idea it was such a new particle! Learning new things every day..
– ssbApr 4 '14 at 8:39

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しかも and しかし can be written 然も and 然し. The etymology is different, but I think in spite of that, this might be a good choice of kanji spelling for しか if such a thing needed to be invented. The rationale being is that it comes from existing grammatical connecting words.
– KazApr 7 '14 at 19:18

+1 for your courage to tell the truth. 「しか」 in that context is a particle and if one knows even the very basic Japanese, one knows only bad thngs could happen if people started writing particles in kanji. Paticles can easily be sandwitched in between kanji words, which would make Japanese a language almost impossible to read.
– l'électeurApr 7 '14 at 23:13

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@TokyoNagoya What do you make of the particle だけ, which can be written 丈? I thought that, even though particles are written with 仮名 in contemporary Japanese, some particles can in principle be written with 漢字. (More examples: 程, 等, 迄, ...)
– Earthliŋ♦Apr 7 '14 at 23:24

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I think the better question which is posted above is why are you answering a question that you don't know the answer to? (clearly, しか is written exclusively in 仮名 in modern Japanese, but I assume the question of whether it has a kanji is more historical).
– virmaiorApr 8 '14 at 5:26

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You can't prove that a fact is in fact a fact, so to speak, but you can do better than present a simple guess (without references) as an answer.
– Earthliŋ♦Apr 9 '14 at 17:33